Thursday, February 23

2017 Royal Poetry Rumble: The Sixth Part

Ahh yes, the idiotic internet project once it is
just over halfway finished, when one starts to suffer the digital existential
crisis of whether any of this has any purpose or merit whatsoever. The only
thing to do though is blindly hack on towards the end, swinging your keyboard
kukri machete indiscriminantly without a fuck to be given.

Both Solmaz Sharif and Jay Hopler made the
National Book Award short list last season for books of poetry. Hopler has
already been part of this 2017 fracas of battle poetry, whereas Sharif has not.

The Sharif poem is very sparse, with extreme
spacing, and considering it is about confinement there is some assumed
importance to that. Having briefly worked with jail writing programs (and
really needing to do so again), the thick sadness which can never be revealed
fully that one feels in such environments is fairly overwhelming. You cannot
shower it off of you. It is a psychic grime. This poem, whether it wanted to or
not, triggers that memory for me, and thus, is a solid punch of poetry.

The Hopler poem also triggers thoughts, namely how
there is a weird picture of me as a tiny human where I look exactly like the
male version of my youngest daughter, and she in fact has somehow dislodged
this photo from whatever album it was in, and now it floats around her room,
sometimes tacked to the wall, sometimes just sitting on the side table,
sometimes beneath my feet on the floor as I tuck her in at night. Memories of
our youth for whatever reason bring up melancholy as well because I guess we
always end up realizing a lot of the hope we are spoonfed as a youngster is
ultimately bullshit, which is likely why somebody wrote HELL in Hopler’s poem.

THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: "Lanat Abad"
is immediately disqualified due to utterly self-indulgent formatting and I
don't even feel bad about it for a second. "The Light One Finds in Baby
Pictures," in addition to being monumentally less obnoxious on the page,
describes the light as old and pale and hurt, which is as correct as I think
anyone has ever been about light, and, I mean, think about that.

WINNER: "The Light One Finds in Baby
Pictures"

Harsh but fair. Gone at #15 is Solmaz Sharif, she
of the self-indulgent formatting.

Joy Harjo is back! And she is also my favorite
now. Liz Howard makes her first appearance, as one of last year’s Griffin Prize
winners, which I don’t remember what it is nor do I feel like looking it up,
but ultimately it doesn’t matter because big poetry prizes are a fucking racket
and your local homeless people write (freestyle) better poetry than most of
what is considered Must-Read Poetry by the poetry industry (which, without academic
subsidy, would have long been bankrupt).

I do not pretend to equate “white” underclass or
any underclass with the native experience, but there are similarities
(intersectionalism) in how we learn to deal with the shit life piles upon us,
such as in this poem when she writes about losing days: “Easy if you played
pool and drank to remember to forget.”

So much is fucked about United States existence
right now, and it’s not fucked in like “well these things are breaking and need
fixing” but the actual infrastructure of what is United States is so immensely
perverted and corrupt that honestly the whole thing needs to go ahead and
breakdown in order to ever have a hope of being halfway right again. The
foundation is rotten and we’re thinking we can just put a new coat of paint on
the drywall. I vote for giving everything back to the oldest 1000 indigenous
people on the continent, and let them decide what happens next.

This Harjo poem is not my favorite I’ve read in
her run through these Royal Poetry Rumbles, yet even lacking in that relative
scale, it is so thoroughly worthwhile. In her lesser moments, she is still more
immense than most poets could hope to be. I remind myself (again) that I really
need to go get every fucking book of her’s from the university library, today.

Liz Howard’s poem is a good coupling with the
Harjo one, and Howard herself is also indigenous. For clarification, Harjo is
Mvskoke, and Howard is Anishinaabe. Also, in consulting the Wikipedia page on
Howard, she studied cognitive neuroscience (which is some shit I love, to be
honest). Howard’s poem is a good one as well, and without having known she was
indigenous, it could be deduced. I’d like to think that if we really stripped
down our social constructs, we were all ultimately indigenous, and when I am
forest bathing amidst oaks and pines and crows, this makes sense. But when I
walk through “civilization” (the scariest of scare quotes) it is pretty obvious
that this is wishful thinking on my part. Our social constructs have destroyed
too much shit.

THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: "An American
Sunrise" is an admirably tough little poem and the "American" in
the title is doing real work here so when I say what I am about to say about
that I am actually excluding this poem from it mostly *but* the tendency in
American things to think that putting the word American in front of an ordinary
thing somehow makes it extraordinary or somehow more worthy of solemn refection
is in my view a symptom of the (contemptible) habit of thought present even in
many Americans critical of America to think that some unique thing is either at
work in America or was once at work in America but now isn't and so saying an
American something is going to make it more poignant; there is no other nation
in the history of civilization that has been this needlessly baselessly
arrogant even when writing/acting in supposed critique of this arrogance and so
in that way yes there you go there is your unique experiment, no one has ever
had their heads this far up there own asses, fuck off. But again this poem is
good, and tough, and better than "Standard Time," which stacks up
some images well enough that it is definitely ok.

WINNER: "An American Sunrise"

Again, harsh but fair scholarship, which likely
will remain in the back of my mind from this point forward. Liz Howard more
than respectfully bows out at #14.

Diane Seuss has knocked someone the fuck out of
this thing already. Kyle Dargan makes a RPR debut, having been a Kingsley Tuft
finalist.

In reading Seuss’s poem about Paris, I will admit
right out front here that I am needlessly biased against the French. Actually,
in realizing this bias in recent years, I have come to a greater appreciation
of French culture, but the very simple linguistic harshness of their language
bothers me. (I also am bothered by loud eating, specifically smacky eaters, and
this fills me with rage at times, so I’m sure I have some sort of skull
interior deficiency or imbalance involved in all this.) So I caught no feels
for this Paris poem, like none. It was certainly a poetic poem, and I knew I
was supposed to catch feels, but nope, none. I am cold and indifferent to it.
I’m not proud of this, but it is what happened.

Meanwhile, the robots which are coming have
“clear-cased woofers for heads” in the first line, and fuck if I do not
understand that phrasing pretty deeply with my paranoid half-luddite ass.

They await counterintelligence

transmissions from our laptops

and our blue teeth

YES! And Dargan does not stop, offering up
abandoned industrial rust belt shitholes to these robots, attempting to “barter
for our lives”. This speaks to all my worries in this very moment of sitting in
front of two monitors inside one cubicle with less life to live than I had
yesterday. (Also my cell phone is sitting there, like a little fucking
tombstone mock-up, just waiting to vibrate with more nothing.)

THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: "Don't Say
Paris" has a world-weariness that feels unearned but what do I know, maybe
it is the best earned thing ever and I am just being difficult. I think it is
notable that of the two flowers (I think it was just two) mentioned here one is
a peony, which is I think the most over-represented flower in all of literature
(I say this with no desire to slight the peony itself). The excellent and at
times superweird-Jungian novelist Robertson Davies I think wrote in his letters
that his first memory was of a peony but I have become so suspicious of the
peony as a trope or topoi or commonplace or maybe all three that I don't know
what to believe (and he was a sneaky guy, too, so I am troubled all the more).
"The Robots Are Coming" is utterly trivial but calls to mind the
thing Tolkien said in one of his letters as the destruction of Germany (which
grieved him awfully despite having sons in the war, and he himself a solider in
the war before it) loomed and that is there would be, as he saw it, no true
winner but the machines, the machines. I am going to go so far as to risk
breaking with the whole spirit of this exercise and actually look it up:
"Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final
inconclusive chapter—leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or
maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the
Machines." It is haunting and right.

WINNER: "Don't Say Paris"

Dammit! THIS IS NOT UTTERLY TRIVIAL KVLT SCHOLAR –
WE NOW LIVE IN A COLD AND HEARTLESS AGE OF ROBOTIC THINKING. (I guess the
mention of Tolkien’s letter co-signs this sentiment, but I am disappointed in
the lack of love for Dargan’s poem. Perhaps this once I will call this decision
both harsh as well as unfair.

starting points

What It Do

Low art formed in low places by a real dude. Bread words on the bedazzling bedeviled internet machines. For flesh and blood contact, or exchanges of treasure or tribute): RAVEN MACK PO BOX 270 SCOTTSVILLE, VA 24590. For 1s and 0s robot contact (or exchanges of virus and vinegraic piss): ravenmack at gmail dot com. Paypal support can be thrown at that email address too if you got it like that.

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